I.S.L.E. day

This week I tried to organize my work in a different way and dedicate one day to one project (and its tasks). Today the day was dedicated to I.S.L.E. tasks:

• I prepared a draft version of the template for the ISLE deliverables
• I worked on the learning scenarios that the Agro-Know team is going to present during the Summer School of the project in Malta in a couple of weeks. A went through my presentations again and slightly revised them (these revisions will never end - each time I find something different to revise!) 
• I implemented some of the project's website revisions discussed during the project's 2nd Meeting in Teramo, Italy in February. This took me a lot of time because I am not really familiar with the Joomla! platform and the number of changes was really big... not only I had to make hyperlinks for more than 80 institutional logos, but to create and populate some lists with web links relevant to the project, and I had no idea how to do that. So the help from Yiannis (Devplus) proved to be really valuable!

BSCW Workspace interface

• I worked on the final details of the ISLE workspace (based on the egroupware platform) and started working on the workspace's handbook. I hope I will manage to finish it by tomorrow, since it will cover only the basic functions of the platform. We had to migrate from the BSCW public workspace, as the available storage space was really limiting.

e-groupware Filemanager user interface

In the meantime I had the chance to work on a presentation for the EFITA 2011 Conference that will take place in Prague, Czech Republic between 11-14 July. I also made a little break and revised some of my presentations for the 4th Organic.Balkanet project meeting and training that will take place next week in Maribor, Slovenia.

Then there was this awful lot of emails that had to be answered (some of them immediately!) and some internet connection issues that really disorganized me...it was a good thing that I had all this offline tasks in my schedule, so it was really easy to keep up with my work.

Working on ISLE stuff

Today I decided to dedicate the majority of my time in sorting out various ISLE issues. I worked on the adaptation of the learning scenarios so that they fit the specific needs of the project and I prepared a draft version of both the template for the description of the educational scenarios and the activities, as well as the template for the presentation of these scenarios. I really hope that I will succeed in presenting the concept of educational scenarios during the ISLE 3rd project meeting / Summer School, which will take place in Malta, between July 4-8, 2011.

I find the idea of educational scenarios really interesting and I have already supported it in various cases (such as the educational scenarios of Organic.Edunet & the training scenarios of eCOTOOL and CerOrganic). I am willing to work hard in order to succeed in promoting educational scenarios in the case of ISLE network as well.

In addition, I took over the Greek translation of another survey which is to be circulated by the network to potential stakeholders, in order to evaluate the status of "Professional Practice and Sustainable Development" in each participating country. It's a good thing that I managed to complete this task in time!

There are also some additional questionnaires about the status of Sustainable Development in the various universities around Europe. The links to these three surveys (for Academic staff, Academic Institutions and Students) were forwarded to key-persons, hoping that they will provide us with their responses based on their experience. 

Preparations for the Organic.Balkanet training

During the last two days I have been working on the training curriculum of the Organic.Balkanet, as it will be used during the training that will take place in the premises of University of Maribor, Slovenia from June 27th to July 3rd. At the same time, the 4th project meeting will also take place. My presentations will deal with topics on creating interactive courses, the use of ICT tools in training courses and working with training scenarios.

In order to start organizing the courses prepared for the training, it was really important to work on the Organic.Balkanet instance of MOLE. The TUC/MUSIC team was kind enough to prepare the instance for us, so we worked together on solving some translation issues and some minor bugs (even though almost no bugs were left after the intensive bug-hunting of the last weeks, before and during the CerOrganic Summer School!). I would like to thank especially Xenia & Nikos for their support with MOLE platform!

The two MOLE handbooks (for trainers & trainees) which have been developed with the precious help of the TUC/MUSIC team will have to be revised and another handbook for the implementation of training scenarios in the Organic.Balkanet context has to be designed.

Apart from that, a significant number of presentations has to be developed from scratch or revised to fit the purposes of the project. The wide variety of topics is really challenging, as I will have to discuss about both technology and for conventional tools and methods.

This 5-day trip will be the first of a series in June-July, so everything has to be designed and prepared very carefully, now that time is available!

CerOrganic ToT School - Day 5

Day 5 of the CerOrganic training school is almost over. The majority of the participants are already in a case study visit in some greenhouse in Plakias village, Rethymno perfecture. I have a flight to catch and things to pack, so I had to stay behind, participating in a meeting with people from EU who are making sure that everything is ok with the CerOrganic project.

Today we had some interesting sessions: Case studies from the participating user countries (Austria, Czech Republic, Greece & Hungary). In addition, we had some really interesting training scenario presentations from the Czech team. I was really excited to see what the participants acquired and developed only in a few days! I really believe in the concept of training scenarios and I plan to work on them intensively during the next months.

As regards the training scenarios, they are going to be tested in the Organic.Balkanet EU project as well. In addition, I am going to revise the handbook for the training scenario implementation, based on feedback received during the CerOrganic ToT school. The presentations about the training scenarios have to be more interactive and provide more example of training scenarios. I just hope that I will have enough time to dedicate to this task.